Trump v. Barbara

Majority — Roberts

Joined by: Sotomayor, Kagan, Barrett, Jackson

The majority held that the Citizenship Clause was written to codify the English common law principle of jus soli — citizenship by place of birth — which granted citizenship to nearly everyone born on the sovereign's soil, with narrow exceptions only for children of foreign diplomats and those born in territory outside the sovereign's actual control. The Court reasoned that the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" tracks the same boundaries Chief Justice Marshall drew in Schooner Exchange v. McFaddon: the United States exercises full territorial jurisdiction over all private individuals present within its borders, including temporary visitors, and only diplomatic personnel and similar figures fall outside that jurisdiction. The majority further held that its 1898 precedent in United States v. Wong Kim Ark already settled this question, finding that the Fourteenth Amendment was "declaratory" of the common law rule and extended citizenship to children of all aliens — whether permanent residents or temporary visitors — except those in the narrow diplomatic and tribal-sovereignty categories. The Court rejected the government's argument that citizenship requires "primary" or "complete" allegiance rooted in domicile, finding no evidence in the text, history, or congressional debates of the Fourteenth Amendment that the ratifiers intended a domicile-based limitation. The majority noted that words like "mother," "father," "lawful," and "temporary" — central to the Executive Order — appear nowhere in the Citizenship Clause, and that post-ratification executive practice cannot override the constitutional text.

Dissent reasoning

Justice Thomas, joined by Justice Gorsuch, argued that American citizenship has always been grounded in domicile — a person's legal permanent home — not mere physical presence at birth. The dissent contended that the Reconstruction Congress enacted both the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Citizenship Clause to guarantee citizenship to formerly enslaved people and others who were permanently settled in the United States, not to extend citizenship to children of temporary foreign visitors who remained legally attached to their home countries. In the dissent's reading, the phrase "subject to the jurisdiction thereof" means full and complete jurisdiction of the kind a government exercises over its domiciliaries — covering personal law, taxation, protection abroad, and primary allegiance — not the limited territorial authority a government exercises over any visitor who happens to be present. The dissent pointed to decades of post-ratification executive practice, congressional re-enactments, state laws, court decisions, and legal scholarship — all of which, it argued, consistently treated the Citizenship Clause as excluding children born to parents not domiciled in the United States. The dissent further argued that Wong Kim Ark itself was decided on facts involving parents who were domiciled in the United States, and that the majority's reading of that case as establishing a broad, domicile-free rule of birthright citizenship goes beyond what the Court actually held. Justice Alito filed a separate dissent, and Justice Gorsuch also filed a separate dissenting opinion.